By the time John W. Miles started looking into the matter, the idea that ocean waves were formed by wind pushing along the surface was considered inadequate – but the right explanation was not so clear.

In a seminal paper on the subject in 1957, Mr. Miles finally detailed the scientific reality, in which waves from the ocean interact with waves in the atmosphere and extract energy from the wind.

Mr. Miles' theory, part of a career in fluid mechanics that landed him at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1964, “is still the core theory” in the field, said Rick Salmon, another researcher at Scripps.

“That's an astonishing length of time ... in a field that's that complicated,” Salmon said.

And it's important to remember that Mr. Miles developed his ideas well before the computer age, Salmon noted.

“His theory was a pencil-and-paper theory,” he said.

Mr. Miles, a longtime resident of La Jolla, died Oct. 20 in Santa Barbara, after a stroke. He was 87.

He was born in Cincinnati and received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, all from the California Institute of Technology, in successive years beginning in 1942. During World War II, he participated in an effort centered at the Radiation Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to design radars to detect German submarines.

Mr. Miles was known as a very private man and typically shunned the spotlight for his scientific achievements, colleagues said. He was a longtime editor for the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, which published his famed 1957 work.

John Rubel, a lifelong friend who attended Cal Tech with Mr. Miles, said he set up his own weightlifting equipment in a very small dorm room, a precursor to a lifetime of devotion to physical fitness and good health.

Mr. Miles “went swimming in the ocean every day, summer and winter, for decades,” Rubel said.

Mr. Miles' daughter, Patsy Fiske, said her father gave up driving around age 40 and “pretty much got around on his bicycle” after that. He was also an avid backpacker and hiked California's 211-mile John Muir Trail.

Mr. Miles joined the Scripps Institution at University of California San Diego in 1964 after 16 years at UCLA, as part of the then-newly founded Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

In between the two University of California jobs, Mr. Miles and his family spent three years in Australia. He held academic positions there, but according to family and friends, the real motivation for moving there stemmed from the Cold War and a feeling that the southern hemisphere could be a safe refuge from the era's perceived threat of a nuclear war.

It wasn't fear that prompted the move, Salmon said, but rather a sense of responsibility for helping science survive any nuclear holocaust.

In 1980, Mr. Miles was appointed vice chancellor of academic affairs at UCSD, a post he held for three years.

He retired from Scripps in the mid-1980s but continued to supervise graduate student research and conduct more research. In 1990, an international symposium on fluid mechanics was held at Scripps to honor Mr. Miles' 70th birthday and his contributions to the field. His awards included the Timoshenko Medal of the American Society of Mechanic Engineers.

Mr. Miles' wife, Herberta, whom he met at Cal Tech, died three years ago. He is survived by three daughters, Diane Jose of San Diego, Patsy Fiske of Santa Barbara, and Ann Leslie Albanese of Solvang. At his request, there was no memorial service. His ashes were scattered at sea.